Now and again there arises a call for a break from the “agrarian” calendar that schools are “stuck on”. Move to the modern ways, go year round. Times have moved on. Year round is the way to go, or at least some version of it. Sound familiar? It’s an old refrain that recycles from time to time, usually just prior to someone presenting a new, exciting, and much better way to educate children. It’s job security for the consultant corps. The school calendar in much of the United States actually did operate on an agrarian schedule, long ago, prior to the industrial revolution, which started in the late 1750’s and ran through the 1800’s. When much of the country was still down on the farm, children went to school throughout the year, and it was based on agricultural needs. With the advent of a mass movement into the cities during the industrial gearing up of America, that all ceased. First, the agrarian schedule: think about it. According to an article by Paul Akers, an editorial writer for Scripps Howard News Service, written way back in 1996, the facts are different than the myth. Most crops are planted in early spring or late autumn. Harvesting is mostly from late August to early November. Harvest festivals, oddly enough, happen in autumn. Calving and lambing happen in spring. Back when the population was mostly rural, and farming prevalent, school occurred around planting, harvesting, calving, and lambing. School was out during these times. School was in during the rest of the time. A true agrarian schedule would likely have school during summer and winter, and the school breaks, if any, would be spring and autumn. The current schedule most school districts follow came about after the rural farming population headed for the cities and the manufacturing jobs that were there. Remember that these manufacturing jobs were back east, where the summer months brought heat and high humidity. The school buildings that were built to house this huge influx of children were like the factories–multi-storied buildings. The key thing that was missing in these buildings was air conditioning. Summer time heat and humidity was, and is, a deadly combination. In order to save children from attempting to learn in these stifling, unhealthy conditions, school calendars shut down during July and August, the hottest, most humid months of the year. It had nothing to do with farming, and still doesn’t. A 1990 article by then Senator Michael Barrett, writing for the Atlantic Monthly, points out that “the always growing demand for an educated work force, and the instinct to spare children from formal schooling during the hottest months, regardless of whether they had any role in farming” are the two main factors driving the “traditional” school schedule (credit to Paul Akers for this quote). In any push for a differnt school schedule, and always during a push for year around school schedules, the agrarian schedule myth will be trotted out. It just doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. Next time you hear it, refer to this blog article. It amazes me that this completely weird idea of how farming occurrs, and its relationship to a school calendar, has enjoyed such a long shelf life. I can only imagine the humor the nations farmers glean from it. As always, assume nothing, verify everything. Check out the information presented here for yourself. Let me know what you come up with.

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This story is almost right. Farmers did indeed send their kids to school in summer and winter in the nineteenth century. The “agrarian calendar” was not the current calendar of fall-winter-spring. But the reasons suggested for it here are probably not the most important. Kenneth Gold shows that cities in the late 19th century had school in the summer. Nobody had AC back then, so going to school or working in a hot factory was not a big deal. The real reason for the Sept to June calendar is the widespread adoption of age-graded schooling. Rural schools of the 19th century did not have age-specific grades, and so they could have a “term” of school whenever they wanted for as long as they wanted. But age-grading required coordination among different schools. You had to start and stop at the same time so the third graders could start fourth grade together with those from other schools. I make a big deal of this in chapter 4 of my new book, Making the Grade: The Economic Evolution of School Districts (Chicago 2009). Age-grading was a remarkable (and problematical) invention that is so logical to us now that we misunderstand the schools of the nineteenth century that did not have it.

[…] And now we come to the heart of many people’s gripes about teachers: they get two whole months off for summer vacation, how outrageous. Before seeing how much further you can cram your head up your butt, consider that a variety of different factors led to the current school calendar (and it’s not the agrarian cycle, see [1] and [2]): […]